May 27, 2007

Launching bVibes.com : A Social blogmarking site

Today, I am launching bVibes.com, a social blogmarking (blog bookmarking) website where users submit and vote on blog posts and posts that receive many votes are promoted to the main page. The motivation behind this website is two-fold:
1. There are about 70 million blogs out there and it's a difficult task to find the best posts written. Technorati only helps in identifying top 100 blogs and these blogs grow more and more. But, how about others? Wouldn't it be useful if you can find posts that have been already reviewed and voted for?
2. If you write a good post, how do you increase it's visibility? Is it enough to depend on Google/Technorati search?

Social bookmarking website Digg uses a similar voting and promotion system and has lots of users. If one's submission reaches the main page of Digg, there will be enough hits to the article that might even bring down the website (called Digg Effect). But as many of you know, it's not easy to promote blog posts in Digg because the focus there is on news stories and web pages. I thought we need a dedicated website for blogs given the amount of posts that are being written in blogs. In bVibes.com, you can submit your own blog posts or others' posts.

I thought we also need a mechanism to bring in the best from the numerous posts that are written everyday. My solution is to limit the number of submissions and encourage the users to submit good quality posts. My approach in bVibes is to assign submission credits to users. One can submit as many posts as the number of credits (s)he has. Credits will be renewed every Sunday.

I invite you all to join bVibes.com, read the FAQ first and then submit/vote (To start off, I have submitted some good posts that I came across). Registration takes only 2-3 minutes (it just asks for username, password and email and it's free). If you join during the initial promotion, you will get a minimum of 5 credits every week and your submissions will remain for 30 days (if you join after a few weeks, both these numbers will be lesser). I will also publish the highest voted posts here in Hackosphere during the first few weeks to increase the visibility of your submissions. I encourage you all to actively participate in the submission/voting process because only by working as a community, we can identify good quality blog posts. Come, join the bVibes community!

14 comments:

Unknown said...

Hey Ramani I think that is a great idea and I wish you luck, I saw your post on my bloglines and came over to comment. There are literally thousands of blogs out there and much of them deserve to be able to be voted up to the top, this is a great idea thank you.

Unknown said...

Thanks floyd. I hope you started using the website.

Abhisek said...

thanks so much for this digg-like site.

Derek said...

Hi Ramani,

After hours spent trying unsuccessfully to incorporate digg into my blogger, I have given up.

I've registered with bVibes. Hope that it's more user friendly. All the best!

LOUI$$ said...

Bro, the first thing I do after finish reading this post, is register bvibes.com. You know me, I will support you always, maybe I not always leave comment at your blog, doesn't mean I forget you. I will post a review for bvides.com soon. Anyways, bvides.com a bit weird. lol :D

Soumyadip said...

For so long I was wondering when will Ramani come up with something like this. And when my feed reader informed me about this, I immediately registered. Knowing you there are surely many innovations in store. All the best!

Avatar X said...

i have registered, i like the idea from the principle of it up..

;)

Bobby Revell said...

Hi Ramani, I think it's a great idea. Truthfully you might be way ahead of the pack as the "media" about blogs will only become larger. What I hate about dig is going to 20 blogs and reading a story about another story over and over. A good dig or in the case of your site a good vibe would be a nice couple of paragraphs or more to add to the content. Simply saying read this other guys stuff is what most people do though. I'll stick with bVibes because I know it'll be special and I want to be part of it!!!!!

Unknown said...

Thanks Sowmyadip and Avatar for your encouragement. And Bobby, I do want to make it different than Digg-like sites both quality and quantity-wise.

Abhisek said...

well, i found a site that is ditto of bvibes http://www.bestofindya.com/news/ :o

Unknown said...

Yes, they also seem to use Pligg CMS like bVibes. There are many other websites using this open source software. BUT, bVibes.com is unique because of the submission credits concept. I came up with this idea and modified Pligg source code to support this. I believe this will be the differentiator as the site grows larger.

Singpolyma said...

Could you support OpenID? Pretty please?

Unknown said...

Singpolyma,

As you might have found out, I am using the Pligg CMS(modified for supporting submission credits). OpenID sounds like an interesting concept. I will check if it possible to incorporate it. Or better still, if you can change Pligg code to do this, I will happily accept it in my website.

phydeaux3 said...

Pretty cool. Much luck with it.